Disaffection Chanel 1

The object of one’s affection, through whom one’s world – effectively the world – was sustained, is gone; he or she has been revealed to be an instrument of other forces, foreign to all affection. Would it be absurd to look at tv in this way? Specifically, for children. Spiritually, a child is a fully formed human being. A child is a quick study. As much as to anything and everything this ability in the child applies to its perception of tv and the picture of the world that comes through it and the effect that this picture has on the ideas and feelings of the child regarding sense. An advert for a toy requires, through the child’s liking for the toy, that it participate in an act of commerce, money, debt and exchange. It knows on some level that it is being used. That these tv adverts are about the use of the viewer more than – say – merely providing information about availability. It divorces the child from its innocence: teaches it that this is how things are got, through manipulation, cajoling and pestering: all the things that an advert does. An early cynicism is thus created. Disillusion rapidly sets in about the reality of a world other than this place of adverts (since here is everything!) – especially if the things advertised remain persistently out of reach. “The world is not interested in you; on the contrary, it is only interested in what it can get out of you.” This is the message that’s put across. Affection finds itself pushed into the margins, a secondary consideration at best. Affection is not good enough. It becomes grubby. You find yourself willing to search it out in the cold interstices between demands, a furtive, ashamed, inadequate shadow of the first illusion, given that here nothing works as an end in itself. Nothing is reasonable! Everything is an affront! An outrage! A steal! “Not what I was looking for.”

Perhaps it’s like that line from David Thomas. He tears everything out of his house in a rage. Leaving only the four bare walls standing empty. What is it that remains? What is it that remains when nothing remains? “I searched around for something else to tear out … I reached – deep.” The world wont go. You stare at the tv and the place that’s real remains. You can’t divorce that place. It is always going to be there. So what is there to be divorced? What remains when one can’t divorce that thing that makes one crawl all over the ceiling – ? Can a divorce from the self be instituted – ?